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Comment by schoosi | Hacker News Reader

Not to say I don't appreciate how safe modern nuclear is, but if you're writing an article about the over-dramatization of the Chernobyl disaster, I think it hurts your argument when you neglect to mention the hundreds of thousands who were forced to permanently relocate and the thousand-square mile Exclusion Zone that is still uninhabitable 30 years later. If the disaster were at the nuclear plant in Plymouth, Massachusetts, the Exclusion Zone would include all of Eastern Massachusetts, including the cities of Boston, Providence, and Worcester.

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Reiterating your point, the area is uninhabitable on a timescale of thousands of years. Some estimates are at 20,000 years. The timeline of that region being poisonous extends so far beyond our current history that it's effectively permanent.

There are actual risks of creating permanent dead zones on the map. It shows incredible arrogance and a complete lack of foresight.

What happens when the Chernobyl confinement deteriorates every hundred years or so, and eventually nobody is around to maintain it anymore.

> What happens when the Chernobyl confinement deteriorates every hundred years or so, and eventually nobody is around to maintain it anymore.

Well, nothing - because if there aren't people around to maintain it, there also aren't people around for it to affect. Couple that with the fact that the intensity of the radiation will have significantly decreased within a century and that cancer is a more serious concern in longer lived species and I think you'll find the impact on nature from any future leakage to be minimal.

Yes the impact of nuclear fallout is minimal. Hence why we bury spent fuel miles underground and as far away from people as possible... because its so innocuous.

Because everything relating to nuclear waste is a rational decision coming from a carefully evaluated risk-benefit analysis.

(and because cancer is a much more significant danger for humans than for wild animals)

You don't think not mentioning any of the other problems with nuclear energy hurts the argument? Are we really going to ignore the problem of containing spent fuel?

People down voting this comment, care to add a comment about why you are down voting it? Surely, it's not because you believe spent fuel is not a problem? I hope not because it is a HUGE problem perhaps bigger even than dumping CO2 into the air if you ask me.

Dumping CO2 into the air kills ~6 million a year, ~1 million from particulate pollution alone. Burning coal is dumping spent fuel into the air, including uranium and mercury particulates.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...

Of course it's a bigger problem than storing spent nuclear fuel.

You say that as if you can predict what will happen over the course of the next 10 thousand years. What happens when we run out of places to put the spent fuel? We dig another hole in a another mountain?? What if there is an earth quake 10k years from now and all that spent fuel goes tumbling into the local drinking water? Are you under them impression that stuff like that can't happen or doesn't ever happen? Sounds like a pretty ignorant point of view to me. What if the American government falls and the security details guarding these storage facilities go away and unscrupulous agents have free access to it. They then build thousands of dirty bombs and send the Earth into chaos? You think that's impossible? Sounds to me like you are counting your chickens 10k years before they hatch.

Edit: I read the article, its bias untruthful trash... should I have expect more from Mara Hvistendahl author of such classics as: 'The Vibrator' and 'Origins: The Start of Everything (Where do rainbows come from? What about flying cars, love and LSD?)'

> You say that as if you can predict what will happen over the course of the next 10 thousand years. What happens when we run out of places to put the spent fuel?

You're missing something - coal power ALSO produces radioactive waste. We just seem to be fine with dumping it into the atmosphere.

I am definitely not advocating coal power that's an assumption you made all on your own. The options aren't coal or nuclear, the options are limited, but they are not limited to just two.

Eventually we'll want to build breeder reactors to burn up almost all the "spent" fuel and leave behind waste that has a much shorter half life than Uranium.

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